Ordinarily I should have very little for which to thank Ladbrokes.com. Quite the reverse in fact, especially with my banker bet of the season - David O'Leary at 14-1 to be the first Premiership manager to collect his P45 - going up the chimney when Alain Perrin left Portsmouth to resume his former career as a Jerry Seinfeld lookalike (compare the photos and tell me I'm wrong). This festive season, however, Messrs Ladbrokes have my eternal gratitude, good wishes and are more than welcome to my fiver, which I hope has gone towards their beefed-up sponsorship of the PDC world darts championships.

Talk about a good cause. I cannot tell you what a boon it is to those of us ploughing this particular furrow that the contest now stretches over two weeks and starts before Christmas. It meant that for once I did not have to spend the post-prandial hours on Christmas Day tuned into Cliff Richard's celebrity tennis tournament on Sky, which is not a sweet gig. Maybe if you happen to be a 53-year-old woman in Solihull with an uncertain marriage but otherwise no.

For a start it involves yanking the remote from the vice-like grip of one of my wife's elderly relatives bent on watching the EastEnders Christmas grief-fest or some lame comedy special, so that I can re-tune; and then it means working on some new(ish) Cliff material. I cannot remember, for instance, if I have entertained you before with the story of how Sue Barker turned up at Cliff's mansion one day in her tennis whites with a full bag of rackets and said to the butler answering the door, "Is Cliff coming out?" only to be told, "No, it's all newspaper talk." Obviously with the extremely user-friendly, award-winning (etc etc) Guardian website, it becomes very easy for you to check if that story is tottering back on for an ill-deserved encore and if that is the case I apologise. You know how I hate recycling old material.

Yet no such concerns need cloud the start of a new year that I was able to begin at what the voice of darts Sid Waddell described, with the understatement for which he has become rightly lauded, as "the biggest party on the globe, Essex-style". "A feast of tungsten," he called it and who am I to argue?

There is, of course, a view that enough is as good as a feast but espouse it round Sky's gaff at Isleworth and I suspect you would last about as long as Vanessa Feltz's selection box. Sky's policy is to hit upon a winner and then stuff it down your throat like French farmers in a foie gras frenzy. This year's darts championships, they never tired of telling us, was bigger, bigger, bigger than ever before; more players, more matches, more prize money and more women in the audience with tattoos on the upper arm (that was not in Sky's stats - I worked that one out myself).

More than 15 cameras are used for each match, which you might think a little excessive for two guys slinging small missiles at a board, but then if Sky had been at Dallas in November 1963 it might have spared us a lot of arguments and Oliver Stone's overblown film. And you cannot say the cameras are not put to good use. There is that great close-up they move in for when a chap needs a double to win a vital leg, ratcheting up the tension in a way it is difficult to do in football, even for a penalty shoot-out; and my other favourite piece of camera-work, the swoop round the audience during the players' ring-walk, or oche-walk, which conveys the raucous atmosphere at the Circus Tavern, Purfleet, perfectly.

It also, I am afraid to say, tends to confirm the stereotype that darts attracts an uncommon number of spectators who look like they might have feasted on more than tungsten, the kind of folk whose stools Gillian McKeith would examine with particular interest. Maybe developing an ample girth is the darts fans' equivalent of football's replica shirt, flattering your idol through imitation, or is it that you first develop an interest in darts on licensed premises, where they keep on selling you high-calorie alcoholic drinks and before you know it you look like a darts fan? Anyway it was a good job they had 15 cameras there to cover that audience.

The real joy of the darts, though, remains Sid, who I suspect has drawn into the sport thousands of viewers like me who, in the normal run of things, would not give much of a fig whether or not one fat bloke in a gaudy shirt should beat another. Thanks to Sid's unbridled enthusiasm we can now see beyond the Hawaiian shirts and well-upholstered followers - not entirely, of course, I still have a column to write - and enjoy the finer points of the game while occasionally puzzling over the quirks of some of the players.

Phil Taylor, for instance, who we learnt bought his 20-year-old protégé Adrian Lewis a diamond ring for Christmas. Lewis showed it to one of the 15 cameras and blow me if it wasn't a really showy one. Is it normal in the Potteries for men to give each other presents of fancy jewellery? I really do not know but thanks Sid for introducing us to this fascinating breed of sportsmen. And thank you Ladbrokes for putting up the money to help the feast last over the entire festive eternity. Half a million well spent, I should say.